Attracting the Heart : Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion in Sri Lankan Monastic Culture

An idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling—love, hate, jealousy, ambition—while relating to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes an unprecedented look at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on "multimoment" histories, Samuels highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. Positing a nexus between aesthetics and affect, he illustrates not only how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, but also how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty. Samuels uses the voices of informants to reveal the delicately negotiated character of lay-monastic relations and temple management. In the fields of religion and Buddhist studies there has been a growing recognition of the need to examine affective dimensions of religion. His work breaks new ground in that it answers questions about Buddhist emotions and the constitutive roles they play in social life and religious practice through a close, poignant look at small-scale temple and social networks. Throughout, Samuels makes the case for the need to account for emotions in making intelligible the behavior of religious participants and practitioners. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork that includes numerous interviews as well as an examination of written and visual sources, __Attracting the Heart__ conveys the manner in which Buddhists describe their own histories, experiences, and encounters as they relate to the formation and continuation of Buddhist monastic culture in contemporary Sri Lanka. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of religion, Buddhist studies, anthropology, and South and Southeast Asian studies.

The "1.5 generation" (Ilchom ose) refers to Koreans who immigrated to the United States as children. Unlike their first-generation parents and second-generation children born in the United States, 1.5ers have been socialized in both Korean and American cultures and express the cultural values and beliefs of each. In this first extended look at the 1.5 generation in Hawaii, Mary Yu Danico attempts to fill a void in the research by addressing the social process through which Korean children are transformed from immigrants into 1.5ers. Dozens of informal, in-depth interviews and case studies provide rich data on how family, community, and economic and political factors influence and shape Korean and Korean American identity in Hawaii.

Danico examines the history of Koreans in Hawaii, their social characteristics, and current demographics. Her close consideration of socio-cultural influences firmly establishes the 1.5 generation in the mainstream discussion of identity formation and race relations.

Contents Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgments Notes on Romanization and Naming Practices Dramatis Personae Introduction: Buddhism and Social Relations in Contemporary Sri Lanka 1. Narada Thero: Affective Bonds and the Making of a Social Service Monk 2. Aesthetics of Emotions and Affective Bonds: Monastic Recruitment in Two Sri Lankan Villages 3. Aesthetic-Affective Social Networks and Monastic Recruitment 4. Learning to Be Novices: Monastic Education and the Construction of Vocation 5. Temple Building as Social Service: Family, Community, and Emotion Conclusion: Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion Notes References Index Focusing on 'multimoment' histories, this title highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. This title uses the voices of informants to reveal the delicately negotiated character of laymonastic relations and temple management. An ethnographic study done in Sri Lanka that examines how emtion comes into play in the commitments of laypeople and monastics to each other and to Buddhism